Am I the only one believing that copyright has long outlived its usefulness? After all, copyright is not some natural law or mathematical consequence, but rather a social convention that made sense in the era of the printing press.
Right now, copyright is a significant discouragement to any other entities from taking a story I wrote and claiming it as their own and preventing me from ever growing an audience for my work. It’s far from perfect, and I can’t afford litigation, but it enshrines a cultural value of allowing people to create things and be known for them. Profit is a side effect of this.
Art is already poorly valued compared to the enormous investment time and energy required to produce it. Removing copyright means you can’t even have minimal protections from a more popular person erasing you.
Personally, as much as I hate the concept of copyright, I do still want artists (I include authors etc in this term) to be able to do their work professionally without relying on something like patreon (which primarily predates serialised work like comics) so I would prefer shortening copyright to something more in line with patents, 20 years. How do you, as an author, feel about reform like that?
Alternatively, I’d prefer 30 or 40 years, but I would grudgingly accept 20. :)
Also I think it could he shorter than 20 years, I picked that just because its the length of patents. IMO, if you haven't profited sifficoently off something in say 10 years, then it doesn't really benefit you to hold it for longer. Do you have any reason for 40 years or does it just "feel right", like with my arbitrary choice to have it be parity with patents?
As for 40 years, it allows time for a given work to solidify in history. Multiple generations will have grown. If the work is relevant to multiple generations 40 years after creation, then it should belong to everyone. Twenty years is too short. It would be available to people who grew up with the first printing and to whom it is still relevant.
Basically copyright should be long enough for most things to become firmly irrelevant, outlive their usefulness, or made their changes to society before entering public domain.
A lot of people who oppose copyright would not like this because it intentionally keeps the stuff they want to use out of their reach until they would no longer want it.
For me, the purpose of public domain is allowing what has been important in our cultural history to be for everyone, not locked behind a rent-seeking corporation. But I also want authors to be able to keep control over their own works as long as it remains relevant to them.
I agree I’d like a world full of great art, and a decent fraction of human energy put into art-making seems good.
I grant that copyright plus free markets is one decent way of achieving this.
Now that I try to elaborate the downsides of copyright I fail, other than to say I want to keep legal barriers in the digital realm to an absolute minimum, so as to speed progress.
When I was younger I thought that great art was made by either starving artists or artists with wealthy patrons, but I guess much of the art I enjoy is made by professional artists participating in the copyright economy.
So I suppose agree, though I’d like to see more public dialog analyzing the issue, considering modifications (like you propose in another comment) or alternatives (such as public funding for the arts, tax breaks for patrons, etc.).
(I guess I let my contempt for the patent system bleed into my thinking on copyright.)
But the concept and closer to the original (creators lifetime + x years or some such) seems still very valuable.
Copyright is still the bedrock of how many tech software business actually can make money.
I’m not making a dig at people here. This is just human nature. It’s difficult to see the value in something that you only see as an obstacle.
Open source software is rather unusual. It’s a commune on a massive scale and it gets its value from the generosity of others. in my opinion, it is possibly one of the greatest achievements in the history and future of computing.
However, it heavily depends on copyright to exist. GPL has encouraged (or forced) many companies to contribute to the community when they wouldn’t have otherwise.
These sorts of arguments can be made in either direction.
Cops on the other hand solely exist for the reason of locking people in cages. Why you ever feel like you need to have someone else locked in a cage is beyond me. When I have been the victim of a crime the cops have not shown and when they did have been less than helpful. This is a pattern for all the people in my subjective bubble.
About that whole speech patterns thing. I assume you mean addressing people in a polite way? Thats not enforcing certain speech patterns thats actually just being a respectful member of society.
Uh, maybe if they murder people?
Maybe the business models around creation need to be revisited such that interested parties pay for the creation of a product and not distribution of a product.
Where periodically at each stage of that creation you are getting continued buy in that what you are creating has a market demand that will fund its continued creation.
If you are an indie game developer maybe that means making a demo which gets enough interest to fund you spending the time and resources to make a full game, with no expectations for further revenue post-creation, but with its success meaning your next project is even easier to fund the development of and a comfortable lifestyle rinse and repeating.
We're kinda doing this already with Patreon: give us 5 quid a month, and you get a little game every whenever.